Doubly Massive mmWave MIMO Systems: Using Very Large Antenna Arrays at Both Transmitter and Receiver

One of the key features of next generation wireless communication systems will be the use of frequencies in the range 10-100GHz (aka mmWave band) in densely populated indoor and outdoor scenarios. Due to the reduced wavelength, antenna arrays with a large number of antennas can be packed in very small volumes, making thus it possible to consider, at least in principle, communication links wherein not only the base-station, but also the user device, are equipped with very large antenna arrays. We denote this configuration as a "doubly-massive" MIMO wireless link. This paper introduces the concept of doubly massive MIMO systems at mmWave, showing that at mmWave the fundamentals of the massive MIMO regime are completely different from what happens at conventional sub-6 GHz cellular frequencies. It is shown for instance that the multiplexing capabilities of the channel and its rank are no longer ruled by the number of transmit and receive antennas, but rather by the number of scattering clusters in the surrounding environment. The implications of the doubly massive MIMO regime on the transceiver processing, on the system energy efficiency and on the system throughput are also discussed.Comment: Accepted for presentation at 2016 IEEE GLOBECOM, Washington (DC), USA, December 201

Energy Efficiency and Asymptotic Performance Evaluation of Beamforming Structures in Doubly Massive MIMO mmWave Systems

Future cellular systems based on the use of millimeter waves will heavily rely on the use of antenna arrays both at the transmitter and at the receiver. For complexity reasons and energy consumption issues, fully digital precoding and postcoding structures may turn out to be unfeasible, and thus suboptimal structures, making use of simplified hardware and a limited number of RF chains, have been investigated. This paper considers and makes a comparative assessment, both from a spectral efficiency and energy efficiency point of view, of several suboptimal precoding and postcoding beamforming structures for a cellular multiuser MIMO (MU-MIMO) system with large number of antennas. Analytical formulas for the asymptotic achievable spectral efficiency and for the global energy efficiency of several beamforming structures are derived in the large number of antennas regime. Using the most recently available data for the energy consumption of phase shifters and switches, we show that fully-digital beamformers may actually achieve a larger energy efficiency than lower-complexity solutions, as well as that low-complexity beam-steering purely analog beamforming may in some cases represent a good performance-complexity trade-off solution.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Green Communications and Networkin

Subspace Estimation and Decomposition for Hybrid Analog-Digital Millimetre-Wave MIMO systems

In this work, we address the problem of channel estimation and precoding / combining for the so-called hybrid millimeter wave (mmWave) MIMO architecture. Our proposed channel estimation scheme exploits channel reciprocity in TDD MIMO systems, by using echoing, thereby allowing us to implement Krylov subspace methods in a fully distributed way. The latter results in estimating the right (resp. left) singular subspace of the channel at the transmitter (resp. receiver). Moreover, we also tackle the problem of subspace decomposition whereby the estimated right (resp. left) singular subspaces are approximated by a cascade of analog and digital precoder (resp. combiner), using an iterative method. Finally we compare our scheme with an equivalent fully digital case and conclude that a relatively similar performance can be achieved, however, with a drastically reduced number of RF chains - 4 ~ 8 times less (i.e., massive savings in cost and power consumption).QC 20151217</p